Animated images

Animated images have become quite popular on the World-Wide Web. There
are various sites from which you can download animated gifs
that other people have created: go to your favorite search
engine and search on "animated gifs."
Also, there are various free services, such as GIFWorks, that will manipulate gif images for
you.

You can use many different software tools to create your own
animated images. On a Unix system, you might use the
programgifmerge. For
example, if you have three gif image files named
file1.gif, file2.gif, and file3.gif, then
you can execute the command

gifmerge file1.gif file2.gif file3.gif > animation.gif

to create an animation that displays the three files
in sequence. The program has various options. For instance, the
command

gifmerge -255,255,255 -230 -l8 *.gif > new.gif

will roll all your gif files into an animation that
loops 8 times with a delay of 2.3 seconds between
frames and with the color white (RGB values all 255) set to
be transparent. For further options and examples, see the
gifmerge documentation.

Please do not go overboard with animation. While moving images
do attract attention, they can also distract the reader from
the content of your page. (Have you ever tried to hold a
serious conversation in a room where a television is on?) If
you do use animated images, set them to loop a finite number of
times and then stop.